With the finance industry experiencing profound transformation, seamless, smart banking operations are key. Award-winning, Montreal based, Expertus Technologies combine integrity, security and compliance, expertise and innovation to lead the market.
In a world where consumers and organisations are seeking seamless, smart banking experiences, Expertus are leading the market with their approach to innovation. Their Expertus Payment Services platform combines operational excellence with integrated AI to provide users with genuine insight – allowing them to make better decisions, quicker.
The financial industry continues to evolve rapidly as the power of technology is better leveraged–And with many of the major financial institutions fighting legacy tech and restrictive cultures, innovative fin tech brands like Expertus have been able to provide clients with solutions that have delivered incredible value. The scale of this opportunity will increase in the next few years with banks around the world investing over $100 billion to modernise their payment systems. Meanwhile, regulation creates challenge and opportunity. From individual consumers to large multinationals, people need to carry out financial transactions across international borders. This creates a regulatory and security challenge – a challenge that many companies struggle to address.
Regulation is also creating issues for traditional financial institutions when it comes to data access. The Open Banking legislation that is becoming part of many countries’ regulatory frameworks, is slowly allowing customers more access to their data than ever before. The potential benefits are vast, but being able to realise this potential is a challenge. Expertus have been able to position themselves at the heart of these complexities. Their cloud based payment solutions are used by more than 1,000 entities including banks, credit unions, regulatory agencies and corporates and Expertus processes over $50 billion daily on its platform.
We speak to Jacques Leblanc, CEO of Expertus, to learn more about how they are tackling this complex market.
Jacques, could you please give us a brief history of Expertus and the journey you’ve been on?
Absolutely. We started 19 years ago here in Montreal, and from the outset we believed there was a need to bring innovation to the payment solutions space. There were other providers already in the market, but we believed if we focused on solving real user problems and pushing the capabilities of technology, then we could create something special.
In 2007 we took an important step and were certified as one of the first SWIFT providers, which was a recognition of the state-of-the-art solution we had created. We continued to grow and started to work with larger corporations as well as financial institutions, and in 2018 we were able to leverage the power of Cloud technology to start creating Expertus Payment Services. This was the first native payment platform of its kind and when we launched it to the market in 2020 it was well received.
The most recent chapter in the Expertus story is that we became part of the IBM group in late 2020. We’ve worked closely with IBM for a while, and so this feels like a natural next step.
That’s quite a journey. What have been the crucial elements to help you achieve this success?
I think it’s three different aspects that we’ve never lost sight of. Firstly, it’s crucial to look after all our people – our own people in Expertus and also our clients and partners. Yes, we create complex technology that people rely on, but none of that would be possible without passionate and creative people that made that technology possible.
Second, we challenge ourselves to keep hunting for real user needs. It’s one thing to create clever, visually appealing software, but if we’re not genuinely making things better for our users, then what’s the point?
Finally, we’ve benefited from and tried our best to encourage the evolution that has seen technology opening up the financial data world. For decades the industry was felt to be opaque, but legislation is helping to bring more transparency, and that can only be a good thing.
How does Expertus honour its commitment towards putting its people first?
Our company has always been driven by its culture. We believe that if we focus on bringing together the right people and making sure they feel empowered and motivated, then the success is inevitable.
That’s easy to say, but we live it every single day. A big part of my role is to help every one of our 50 person team to flourish. I want to do what I can to help every member of our team blossom and become the best version of themselves.
I’ve been told before by some of our team that they are surprised, maybe even shocked, when they first join us because they have never experienced a culture like we’ve created here, but I think that’s a good thing. We trust each other; We insist on transparency, and we cherish team spirit.
We recently received certification as a Great Place to Work which was a great external confirmation that all those things that we hold dear are also aligned with what others believe are the right way to treat each other.
And it’s that team spirit and culture that allows Expertus to create the successful software that you’ve launched?
Absolutely. Of course we also hire talented people but talented people who buy into our culture.
We’re very proud of the solutions we’ve created and how it focuses on the users’ needs. As you’ll see, our services are based on leveraging APIs and the Cloud. This means that our clients can integrate our software quickly and easily into their current ecosystem.
The modern day organisation creates a complex web of international relationships and connections with customers, staff and suppliers. We can integrate our Payment Solutions into the very heart of this web, to simplify and streamline it, and then to provide the user with a valuable insight that they can use to improve what they are doing.
We’ve worked hard to ensure that our software brings transparency to our clients and flexibility. We want them to experiment just like we do and so our software needs to be robust for security, but agile with implementation.
And of course, we’ve invested a lot of time and effort to bring the speed and cost savings to our clients that Cloud based solutions can and should offer. We recently became an accredited AWS Advanced Partner and will continue to challenge providers like AWS to keep improving their services so we can build better software on them.
These aspects allow us to help our clients achieve so much and we’re excited about what we can create together moving forwards.
Speaking of moving forwards, what does the future hold for Expertus?
The recent deal with IBM is crucial. We’ve worked together with IBM for a long time and so we’re perfectly placed to take advantage of the opportunities that our new relationship will present immediately.
With IBM’s support we’re going to reach a far broader market, very quickly, which is going to be fantastic. We’re also going to work closely with other IBM companies and find opportunities to combine our offerings and knowledge to create brand new solutions for clients.
I think it’s also important to remember the financial and regulatory environment is evolving in so many markets around the world. These changes are opening up markets and data in ways we’ve never seen before and with that access there comes a lot of opportunity to create unique insight
For further details and specifications on all Expertus solutions, please visit the company website at https://www.expertus.ca/